London’s 10 Best Small Museums

There are more than 200 museums in London, catering to every imaginable interest and field of study—dentistry! The Tube! Dungeons! Even people who live in London may only visit a fraction of these museums, so it feels extra intimidating as a visitor who wants to branch out from the V&A. Here are ten of our favorite small museums, which pack plenty of history into manageable boundaries.

Museum of Brands, Packaging, and Advertising

The 12,000-object deep collection at this Notting Hill museum is all about invoking nostalgia; it’s not unusual to hear a visitor exclaim “I haven’t seen those since I was a kid!” But once you get past the joy of seeing your favorite childhood action figure, there’s plenty on display here about consumer culture, like a comparison of pre- and post-war cookie tins that shows how companies worked around metal shortages. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding about what you purchase and why.

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[The Fan Museum] (http://www.thefanmuseum.org.uk/)

The Fan Museum, which occupies a few small rooms in a house in UNESCO-listed Maritime Greenwich, is often overshadowed by the showier attractions nearby, such as the Cutty Sark ship and the Royal Observatory. But this museum is worth visiting for its painstaking attention to detail and the way that it uses a seemingly innocuous object like a fan to illustrate key moments in European history and the changing role of women over time. When an employee directs you to the “award-winning toilets,” that isn’t a joke: the Fan Museum really has won a prize from the British tourism association for its blue and white tiled, impeccably clean bathrooms.

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The Old Operating Theatre

This tiny museum just south of the Thames used to be part of St. Thomas’s hospital. Now, it has two rooms dedicated to medical history: One is full of old medicine bottles, dusty anatomy textbooks, and other scientific arcana, while the second is a fully intact, well-restored operating theater from the Victorian era. If anything, coming here will make you really grateful for the invention of anesthetic.

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John Keats House

Britain’s rich literary history means that the country is full of museums dedicated to specific writers. One standout is the house near Hampstead Heath where John Keats lived for several years and wrote some of his most famous poems, including “Ode to a Nightingale.” The house has many objects that belonged to Keats, including letters and photos, as well as his death mask, which was brought back from Italy after he passed away there. Fans of the Jane Campion film Bright Star should take note, as this is the house where Keats and Fanny Brawne met, fell in love, and became engaged. Brawne’s engagement ring is also on display.

William Morris was a 19th-century textile designer and one of the major leaders of the Arts & Crafts Movement, which helped popularize decorative arts. His family’s home in the Walthamstow area of London has been converted into a museum paying homage to Morris’s work, such as floral wallpapers, woodblock prints, and tiles, as well as that of his friends and collaborators. Following a relaunch and renovation in 2012, the museum won Britain’s prestigious Museum of the Year Award.

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Geffrye Museum

The Geffrye, also known as the Museum of the Home, is dedicated to preserving entire rooms from middle-class British houses. Their 11 permanent rooms give a sense of typical British life in the 20th century, while the rotating exhibits focus on other elements of domestic life. For example, a recent exhibit on homelessness in Victorian England covered topics like workhouses and orphanages. The museum’s spacious grounds in East London also lend themselves nicely to picnics in summer months.

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Cartoon Museum

The slim, two-story Cartoon Museum fits plenty of colorful, playful illustrations into its space. There’s a major emphasis on British cartoonists, most notably William Hogarth, whose satirical drawings of Georgian-era London made him a pioneer of the genre. And there’s always a celebration of irreverence and free speech: this March, the Cartoon Museum will feature World War II-era comics that parodied Adolf Hitler.

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Museum of Immigration and Diversity

Formally known by its address, 19 Princelet Street, this unassuming house-turned-museum near Spitalfields Market once belonged to a French Huguenot family who came to Britain to escape religious persecution. It became a synagogue in the late 1800s and changed ownership many times before becoming a museum dedicated to archiving the history of immigration in the United Kingdom. The delicate building, which recently got a grant from the British government for necessary repairs, is open for very limited periods of time and is only accessible via group tours booked well in advance.

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Twinings Tea Shop and Museum

The famous Twinings tea shop has been on The Strand since 1706. These days, it’s mostly a store where tourists pick up teas and collectible decorative tins, but if you push through the crowds you'll find a small museum in the back. There are examples of old Twinings packaging, advertisements, pots, and caddies, as well as newspaper clippings and some information about the history of the brand and the Twinings family. Stick around for a cuppa from the in-house brew bar.

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Sir John Soane’s Museum

Sir John Soane was the son of a bricklayer who eventually became a Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy. And this inquisitive young man never stopped learning: Soane traveled around the world, learning about different cultures and bringing artifacts home with him. When he died, an Act of Parliament turned his home into a museum, where it’s not unusual to find an Egyptian sarcophagus wedged between an Italian Renaissance sculpture and a Chinese scroll. There’s also a significant collection of work from the painter J.M.W. Turner, a close friend of Soane’s. Visit on a Tuesday evening to tour the house by candlelight.